Help Me Not Be An Idiot: Come Up with Questions for Chris Roberts

Edit: Alright, the questions have been sent, I chose which I thought would get the deepest answers, so please don’t be upset if I didn’t choose yours. :) Thanks!

So today the PR person helping with Star Citizen sent out an announcement regarding the Kickstarter campaign passing their goal, and in that email, he said he could facilitate an interview if desired.

An interview. With Chris Roberts. Creator of one of the greatest gaming series of all time (yeah, I said it).

So what happens when I read that? My brain seizes up. I can’t even THINK of asking anything because I’m honestly so damned starstruck. The first time I met people I’m a huge fan of, such as George Takei or Nathan Fillion, I was a blithering idiot that could barely string a word together. I don’t want that to happen again.

So I need your help. They’ve agreed to an interview if I get questions from my readers, so guys, this is your chance to ask a question of a gaming legend. If you have a good, relevant question for Chris Roberts, please leave it in the comments below. I’ll pick a few of the best and send them over.

34 Responses

1. The feature list is VERY inclusive. Inevitably some features will be cut, which will lead to disappointment. Wouldn’t have you been better off listing basic features and revealing more as they are finished during development?

2. As someone who prefers my space games solo, will the single player mode be sandbox similar to Freelancer, and open ended?

I can probably come up with more, but you’ll have more than you know what to do with very soon.

Does earth exist?
How far in the future is this?
What are some prevalent technologies?
Will there be warp gates, worm holes, or FTL drives?
What kind of weapons are available? Rail-guns? Lasers? Missiles? Bombs?
What level of customization do you hope to achieve?
Will there be a universal economy and government?
Will there be different starting factions?
What is out there for the avid space explorer? Aliens? Artifacts?
What is a characteristic that sets your universe apart from others?

What is the Physics & Feel of your Game?

Are you going with true Newtonian physics?
Will there be inertial dampening?
Will a ship control like a jet-fighter or a space shuttle?
What is the smallest & largest ship class you can pilot?
How do you contrast the feel of controlling a small fighter as opposed to a battlecruiser?
Will you be able to walk around your ship if it is large enough, or is that more for the single player aspect?
What happens when you crash into an asteroid or another ship?

The Development, Community, and History

You have made some phenomenal games in the past. Is there any outside sources you also pull inspiration from?
When did you get the idea to make another space game?
Was it hard to get people on board or did you know who to go to?
What is your favorite way to play a space game ( Mouse & keyboard, game-pad, or the wonderful joystick )?
Are you more of an explorer, trader, or militant?
What are some things you’d like to add to this game before it’s complete?
What is a question you’ve never been asked?

>Does earth exist?
Yes.
>How far in the future is this?
2942 AD
>What are some prevalent technologies?
Hard to say.
>Will there be warp gates, worm holes, or FTL drives?
Jumpgates mentioned. Dunno about inner system engines or FTL of any sort.
>What kind of weapons are available? Rail-guns? Lasers? Missiles? Bombs?
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
>What level of customization do you hope to achieve?
On ships and customization: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/ships-plan/
> Will there be a universal economy and government?
The pitch is that Earth empire slowly rumbles, like Rome in it’s old days.
>Will there be different starting factions?
No idea.
>What is out there for the avid space explorer? Aliens? Artifacts?
Aliens – yes, check the time capsule link. Artifacts – dunno.
>What is a characteristic that sets your universe apart from others?
Now that’s the question to Roberts, true :)

>What is the Physics & Feel of your Game?
Roberts talks a lot about physics and inertia in his video panel (link above)
> Are you going with true Newtonian physics?
Yes.
>Will there be inertial dampening?
Yes. With ability to manually switch it off.
>Will a ship control like a jet-fighter or a space shuttle?
Piloted neither so no idea :)
>What is the smallest & largest ship class you can pilot?
Pilotable capships were mentioned.
> How do you contrast the feel of controlling a small fighter as opposed to a battlecruiser?
Strictly mass and thrusters power related. More mass – heavier movement. Newtonian at its best :)
>Will you be able to walk around your ship if it is large enough, or is that more for the single player aspect?
Yes. One of the ideas is to be able for 1 player to pilot the ship (think of Millenium Falcon size one) and other players to man turrets or even jump out in a small fighter to defend the mothership.
>What happens when you crash into an asteroid or another ship?
In demo Roberts jet bumped into carrier and lost control for a few seconds and then flew further – just like in old Wing Commander games.

>The Development, Community, and History
These are more theoretical so no comments from me here :)

Another Big Question!
I see you are going for extreme immersion in your game. You can look around your cockpit and everything is extremely detailed. Another Kickstarter project (the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset) looks extremely promising and immersive. Have you thought of supporting the Oculus Rift with your game?

I’ve always dreamed of a space sim where I’ve felt like being a tiny part of a bigger universe, where things happen without me, without scripted events but rather a dynamic sandbox with a continually changing set of conditions, war and peace between different races, trade ships and economy going on around me, discoveries being made, secrets being hidden, wrecked hulks drifting in space from previous battles, I could go on, but a living universe that I could then take part in through whatever means I like. I’ve always thought this was a pipe dream, and perhaps it is. How close will Star Citizen come to realising that dream?

Hey James, welcome to the blog! I like the question, but would you mind if I tweaked it to retain the focus on his game? Such as “As projects like the Freespace 2 Source Code Project have shown us, a game can have amazing legs by allowing community involvement in tweaking it. Will Star Citizen allow for any such community involvement, maybe not in altering its source code, but possibly in other areas?”

1. Releasing server side files means the game will be pirated. A lot. What is his approach on piracy?
2. How “wing commanderish” will be the solo part – Squadron 42? Will the cut scenes be full voiced? Will there be some memorable wingmen? Intermission chit-chat, ship and armament selection?
3. How can Squadron 42 be possibly tied up to Star Citizen in terms of consistency? If every player will have his own experience with some missions won and some lost and some wingmen dead – how can they, after completing Squadron 42 and moving to Star Citizen, have same experience to share (when supposedly they all were in Squadron 42 together fighting the same enemy)?

For me, THE hallmark of the Wing Commander games was immersion through character story. That included everything from first seeing Paladin and Angel in the lounge in WC1 to Chris Blair (aka Mark Hamill) and his romance(s) with Angel, Rachel, and Flint. This is what really set apart the WC games from other excellent space combat sims like the X-Wing series and Freespace. How much emphasis will there be on NPC interaction in Star Citizen?

Same here. Also, believe it or not, Wing Commander is one of the games from the early 90’s that made me to study english (to understand what was Taggart teaching me about fighting kilrathi transports :)).

Alright, I’ve gotta say this somewhere: I’m not thrilled about this game. That shocks me to hell and back to say – I’ve been a space game nut as long as I can remember – but Star Citizen, apart from being prettier than a room full of soap-sudded cheerleaders, seems merely to be a return to the ancient and done-to-death ‘man-shoots-x, man-avoids-being-shot-by-x’ formula. It’s CoD: Modern Warfare, in space. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED Freespace 1 & 2, and have enjoyed many other combat games in my time, but I believe if the space genre is ever to build back into a lasting part of mainstream gaming it has to offer more than the thousand similar experiences of man-shoots-x you can already buy.

Exploration. Show us new worlds of all shapes and sizes. Show us a few of those worlds teeming with strange new life-forms. Show us the ruins of ancient civilizations. Show us humans colonising these worlds and slowly building their infrastructure from technological seeds, starting afresh with 10’000 years of culture behind them. Let us interact with alien races, tour their worlds, see their wonders.

I’d like to know what their plan is to maintain integrity of the persistent world when single player can carry over rewards to it. Will there be anything to prevent you just cheating the single player side then getting the rewards? Will there be robust anti-cheating systems in place for the persistent world?

It sounds like a bunch of combat instances, which aren’t going to be much fun if every other time I get into combat with a little fighter, they’ve modified their ship so it has more firepower and durability than my capital ship.

Will the combat instances be p2p hosted, or will RSI host and validate these?

Thanks for the welcome :) Love the overall concept of the game, and hope they can pull it off. One of my biggest beefs with Eve Online is that I can’t just grab a joystick and head into the stars Independence War 2 style, so this sounds right up my alley.

What I love even more than the game concept itself is to see more and more devs try to break the dev/publisher paradigm. Hope the game is a smash hit.

Anyway, looking forward to reading your thoughts on SotS2, and for this upcoming interview. :)

My pleasure, I adore everyone who visits and takes the time to comment on my little blog here. :) And I hope to get some SotS2 time in this weekend, hopefully the game will last longer than 10 turns. ;) And I agree with you on all of the rest. :)

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